This week, Mitt Romney ripped into Barack Obama’s “culture of dependency” – and rightly so. More people are now on food stamps than at any time in American history; Obama’s administration has gutted welfare-to-work requirements. There’s a reason for that: the Democratic Party relies on those to whom it signs checks to boost them back into office.

That’s become eminently clear in Massachusetts, where the state just sent out voter registration letters to some 500,000 welfare recipients. The move was forced through by the Department of Transitional Assistance after a lawsuit pushed by New England United for Justice, a reconstituted offshoot of the defunct corrupt voter manipulation group Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN). The lawsuit maintained that a woman received her benefits and wasn’t offered the opportunity to “register to vote at any time during her visit.” The mailings will cost taxpayers somewhere in the neighborhood of $275,000. The state also has to advertise on TV and radio stations, again targeting welfare recipients.

This is clearly a Democratic get-out-the-vote effort sponsored by Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA), who is desperately attempting to aid Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, locked in a neck-and-neck race with Senator Scott Brown (R-MA). NEU4J has coordinated with Demos, a liberal group that has sued several battleground states for similar mailings. And guess who chairs the Demos Foundation, funded by George Soros? One Amelia Warren Tyagi, daughter of Elizabeth Warren.

The math is now clear: more people on welfare benefits means more Democratic voters. And taxpayers foot the bill for both the benefits and the voter registration.